ROGERS, "VICKY" (Janet Victoria Rogers)
United States
Born 27 August 1949 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York.
Married Earl McEvoy 1971 and has 4 children and 2 grandchildren as of April 2015.
[Active 1966-1968]
Played singles US Championships 1966 to 1968 and Wimbledon 1968.
Rogers McEvoy reached the finals of the National Girls’ 18 & Under Championships at the Philadelphia Cricket Club in 1967. She also excelled at the Longwood tournament, taking a set from Margaret Smith Court.
Playing Wimbledon in 1968 (her lone journey to the greatest event in tennis) was a special thrill.
“Playing Owen Davidson and Billie Jean King with my doubles partner Roy Barth at Wimbledon was one of the highlights of my career,” Rogers McEvoy said. “We were brought to our matches in a big black car, and as we got out English school girls, who didn’t know who we were, asked for our autographs.”
At the dawn of the open tennis era in 1968, teenager Vicky Rogers walked onto Wimbledon’s fabled No. 1 Court with her partner Roy Barth for their match against defending mixed doubles champions, Billy Jean King and Owen Davidson. Although she lost that day, you can still hear the youthful pride as she recalls “actually playing really well, and being relieved at not being embarrassed.”
At Bournemouth that summer, she took a set from eventual winner and future Wimbledon champ Virginia Wade. At the end of the year she was ranked #2 in the US. It was an amateur only ranking that year, excluding Billie Jean King and Rosie Casals, but still an impressive achievement.
She grew up in Rye, New York. In summers, she and her three siblings spent their days at Manursing Island Club. At age 9, Rogers McEvoy played in a tennis clinic led by John Vinton, who coaxed his young players with free Cokes from the snack bar if their shots hit his target. She won a lot of free Cokes.
Her parents supported the rapid development of their daughter’s tennis. After ninth grade, she left her family and Rye Country Day to attend The Bishop’s School in La Jolla, California. There, she took full advantage of the endless summers and continued to improve, playing in the fiercely competitive California junior tennis circuit. Along the way, she met her great friend and fellow-player Val Zeigenfuss and many others. La Jolla native, Karen Hantze Susman, who won the Wimbledon singles title in 1962, became her hero.
At that 1968 Wimbledon, she recalls getting paid a whopping £50 stipend, since she was still an amateur, and exchanging her player’s tickets for a flat in London, a far cry from today's rich professional payouts.
While she was fulfilling her tennis dreams, another dream developed. Returning home, arguably at the top of her game and poised for more court success, she left it all behind, confidently telling her parents that she’d decided to become a doctor.
When asked about her decision, Vicky said, “I found myself as a player being an entertainer; it was one-dimensional, and I wanted to do more with my life; it wasn’t the way I wanted to go.”
A self-described “all-or-nothing person” and armed with the discipline and problem-solving skills cultivated through her tennis career, she became a pre-med student at Hofstra University.
In 1971, she married a hometown boy, Earl McEvoy and moved to Cambridge to attend Harvard Medical School. The couple have four children and two grandchildren. Dr. McEvoy is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Chief of Pediatrics at Mass General West Medical Group. She is also an author; one of her titles, “Taming Your Child’s Temper Tantrums”, might have been helpful to the parents of another local New York left-hander, who became a Wimbledon champion.
As a pediatrician, she recognizes the perilous position of kids today who get into the sport at such a young age. “I worry about children going exclusively into one sport. With tennis, you must commit so early; academics can suffer too.”
She cautions players against overuse of certain muscles, which can lead to chronic injury. The risk ofoveruse has been exacerbated by tennis’s evolution into a sport where topspin, which can cause problems particularly with wrists and elbows, is dominant and players are continually trying to “brutalize” the ball.
Vicky was inducted into the USTA Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame in 2015.
Sources:
http://rareburghers.blogspot.com/
http://www.eastern.usta.com/news/victoria_rogers_mcevoy_2015_eastern_hall_of_fame_inductee/
http://ryerecord.com/features/after-rye-vicky-rogers-mcevoy-still-at-the-top-of-her-game.html
Source for birth details and ranking 1969 USTA Yearbook.
[Thanks to Rosamund for this information]
